Taking a road trip to nowhere in particular
WELLFLEET - How favorably you respond to Eric Lane's play "Ride," enjoying its world premiere at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, may well depend on your tolerance for precocious brats. In Lily Flores's defense, the character she plays, 11-year-old Sam, is supposed to be annoying - a jabbering know-it-all, "wise," as the cliche goes, beyond her years. The problem is, Flores succeeds all too well. Her mannered performance, engineered so that you always see the gears working, adds the irritant of overacting to an off-putting role, and the sum can be quite wearing.
Harsh words for a performer so young? In taking on this part, with its fully adult language, Flores forfeits the critique-free shield of children's theater. Of course, she didn't write the offending text, she's merely mouthing it, so you also have to question the probity of a playwright who makes such demands on a child. We all know that the threshold of innocence is steadily receding. Does it need a helping nudge in the guise of entertainment?
Sam is the younger sister of the logorrheic Cassie (earnest Jenny Gammello), who works at a New Jersey produce stand alongside the more affluent, less effusive Molly (Marina Squerciati knows enough about acting - especially in WHAT's small Harbor Stage - to hold something back). Lane has won various encomia as a playwright, but he makes a novice's mistakes in piling too much exposition into the opening scene (Cassie manages to work in the fact that her father has been dead seven years) and situating the locus of real drama outside the frame.
We soon learn that, the night before, Molly's father reacted violently when she accused him of having an affair (he and his paramour left an e-mail trail). Judging from the aftermath, it was quite a confrontation. But what we'll be seeing instead for the next two hours is her trauma-muddled response, as she decides to run away - and fulfill a retaliatory mission - in the car he gave her as hush money.
Cassie and Sam go along for the ride, for reasons of their own (says Sam, "This is so much better than gymnastics"). The desultory story line is itself continually interrupted by serial monologues in which Cassie, getting her first taste of transgression, (1) tries out lies she'll never have the courage to float by her mother (she dutifully labels each of these "What I didn't say") and (2) spins, bit by bit, a gee-whiz exegesis about Anne Frank, with whom she evidently identifies. The latter parallel seems a rather tasteless means of making the simple point that a girl who has lost her father (or believes she has, as Frank did during her final days at Bergen-Belsen) might be subject to bouts of despair. Moreover, the upshot is that Cassie the drudge, the least intriguing character in the trio, claims the bulk of stage time.
After a big cathartic explosion, chatty Cassie gets her twinkle back (here Lane's background, writing for a soap, comes to the fore), and all is well, nothing all that momentous having happened.
The girls' interactions rarely seem realistic: They're what an adult might posit, based on third-hand impressions via the media. Daisy Walker's direction is static, and Kevin Judge's set (an all-purpose revolving farm stand/automobile/motel room) unimaginative, down to the free-floating steering wheel that Molly clutches on her lap. Rudderless is the overall impression that this production gives off, even - especially! - when Sam's busy being obnoxious.
